Fragments, vol. 5

I’ve learned with time that my mind has periods of attentiveness followed by drifts into passive, relaxed states of consciousness. I’m awake but almost empty. I might be taking a shower or staring out the window at nothing. That’s when I occasionally find myself in an old song or childhood memory or, more mysteriously, inhabiting a character from fiction, taking on his values. When I become conscious of this channeling, it disappears leaving a faint, lingering impression, like the afterimages left by bright lights.  Recently I found myself in Austin King, the Illinois lawyer, father and put-upon husband at the center of William Maxwell’s 1948 novel, Time Will Darken It. It’s the opening scene. King is in his bedroom getting dressed for a party for relatives visiting from Mississippi. His wife, pregnant with their second child, is not speaking to him. She resents the party and the presence of outsiders.   I wasn’t recalling the words but the setting, emotional and physical, which I had abstracted from the text. I’ve read Maxwell’s novel three or four times, starting in the late seventies. I know it well. Unintentionally, I had projected myself into King because his emotional state was familiar – conflicted, guilty, wanting to satisfy contradictory wishes and please everyone. I didn’t have to go looking for it. I carry it as a latent memory.   There’s a semi-popular theory floating around out there that we read fiction to boost our empathy quotient. In short, we read to learn to be better human beings, to feel the pain of others. That’s silly but also kind of obnoxious. How self-centered. Willa Cather would have snorted. My flashing onto the bedroom of Austin and Martha King lasted seconds. I enjoyed the sensation but made no effort to hang on to it. It was a fairly primitive mental event, not freighted with philosophical baggage. A handful of other fiction writers have done this for me, all in my private pantheon – Chekhov, James, Proust, among others. Part of the reason I value them is that they leave these phantom scenes in my subconscious mind, through no effort of my own.   Time Will Darken It, along with So Long, See You Tomorrow (1980), is Maxwell’s finest novel.  In 1955, Maxwell delivered a speech at Smith College, “The Writer as Illusionist” (collected in the 2024 volume of the same title, published by Godine). He likens a novelist to a dog who dreams of chasing a rabbit. He writes:   “The novelist’s rabbit is the truth—about life, about human character, about himself and therefore by extensionh, it is to be hoped, about other people. He is convinced that this is all knowable, can be described, can be recorded, by a person sufficiently dedicated to describing and recording, can be caught is a net of narration. . . . . But what, seriously, was accomplished by these writers [Maxwell has just mentioned Turgenev, Lawrence, Woolf and Forster] or can the abstract dummy novelist I have been describing hope to accomplish? Not life, of course; not the real thing; not children and roses; but only a facsimile that is called literature.”     The finest writers of fiction, those we treasure most highly, work simultaneously in two mediums – words and human beings. William Maxwell died twenty-five years ago today, on July 31, 2ooo, at age ninety-one.

It must be encoded there, in the childhood memories of our synapses and our cells — how we came out of the ocean 35 trillion yesterdays ago, small and slippery, gills trembling with the shock of air, fins budding feet, limbs growing sinewy and furred, then unfurred, spine unfurling beneath the bone cave housing three pounds of pink flesh laced with one hundred trillion synapses that still sing with pleasure and awe when touched by the wildness of the world. Even as the merchants of silicon and code try to render us disembodied intellects caged behind screens, something in our… read article

“The man who is both happy and an optimist is an imbecile.”  Happiness has always felt like the byproduct of life properly lived, not a goal unto itself. If I “behave” – live up to my own standards, not exaggerate my importance, pay minute attention to my conscience, respect others when they deserve it and occasionally when they don’t – I can settle for “happiness.” I define it not as bliss but as ease, a sort of momentary relaxation of vigilance. It doesn’t have a lot to do with getting my way and I can’t usually blame others when “unhappiness” creeps in.   The late Terry Teachout rather charmingly characterized himself (and H.L. Mencken, about whom he wrote a biography) as an “ebullient pessimist,” and I promptly adopted the description as my own, though I’m certainly less ebullient than Terry. In defiance of the customary understanding of “pessimist,” there was nothing gloomy or grim about him. He was a regular guy, fabulously learned, hard-working, seemingly undefeated by life’s inevitable troubles. His company was always energizing, even via the internet. My wife and I had lunch with him here in Houston in 2018, when he signed my copy of Pops, his biography of Louis Armstrong, “in honor of a special day.”   I’m skeptical of people who casually declare themselves “optimists.” I’m reminded of the character of Imlac in Dr. Johnson’s Rasselas:   “The state of a mind oppressed with a sudden calamity . . . is like that of the fabulous inhabitants of the new-created earth, who, when the first night came upon them, supposed that day would never return. When the clouds of sorrow gather over us, we see nothing beyond them, nor can imagine how they will be dispelled: yet a new day succeeded the night, and sorrow is never long without a dawn of ease. But they who restrain themselves from receiving comfort do as the savages would have done, had they put out their eyes when it was dark.   There is, in other words, something profoundly self-centered about optimism, a sense that if I don’t get my way I’ve been cheated. How unfair the world is. The sentence at the top was written by Jules Renard in his Journal on July 30, 1903. I think of Renard not as a doomsayer but a pragmatic, rough-and-tumble realist, with the sensibility of a farmer.     [The Renard passage is taken from Journal 1887-1910 (trans. Theo Cuffe, selected and introduced by Julian Barnes, riverrun, 2020).]